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Press

“one of Forced Entertainment's warmest, most accessible shows.”
The Times

Programme notes and essays

Read the programme note by Forced Entertainment’s Artistic Director Tim Etchells here.

‘Story Street in Liverpool is strictly one way.  There are speed bumps as if any stories here are going to be slow ones, stories deterred or held in close check.  Middle of the street is a stationer, pens, pencils and paper for writing on.  A good omen maybe.’

Through the Summer of 2002 the company undertook a series of journeys and researches, often travelling alone to locations in the UK to complete tasks determined only partially in advance.  These tasks; to get a fortune told, to find locations for an imaginary film, to ask tricky questions in public and not-so-public places, or to visit streets chosen simply for their names, were the beginnings of a mapping process aimed not so much at the contemporary UK but through it to something else – a landscape of ideas, narratives and bad dreams.

In some ways The Travels isn’t typical of our work but then having spent eighteen years producing theatre, durational performance, installation, video and digital media it could well be that typical isn’t too useful a concept to describe Forced Entertainment anyway.  The Travels does belong to a particular strand of our theatre work, the strand of distorted, intimate and even fictional documentary.  The start of this strand was a project we made in 1994 to mark the company’s tenth anniversary, a look back on the work we’d made and on the landscape (political, cultural) which had given rise to it. Decade was followed by Nights in This City, a mischievous guided bus tour that re-wrote and re-mixed the history(ies) of Sheffield and later Rotterdam and more recently in 2001 by Instructions for Forgetting, a project created from fragments of video, stories and letters donated by friends in different parts of the world.  In different ways each of these projects has been a kind of mapping of a world or moment in time, - an off-balance mapping that has an eye both to the facts of time and place and to ripples of stories and ghosts that are at work in it.

“The usual intentions of cartography were now collapsing.  Either that or the route itself was becoming so insecure … (OR?)  that mapping it was a foolhardy occupation.”
Peter Greenaway A Walk Through H.

Like Decade and Instructions, The Travels also occupies a different formal space than the majority of our theatrical projects.  The preoccupation with representation and with theatre itself; the array of preposterous costumes (from pantomime, strip club, am-dram or whatever), the slipping in and out of pretending, the whole discourse of performer, persona, and character are here stripped-down in favour of a more straightforward presence.  Here the performers are, more or less, present as themselves, sharing time and space with those watching, telling, recounting, reading and constructing the performance from evidence gathered elsewhere.

The elsewhere of The Travels is, we hope, a double one.  It is the elsewhere of the places visited in creating the performance, the streets, dive bars, theme parks, beaches, and dead end roads at day and night, but it is also the elsewhere of a fiction, of a journey and a state of mind, that we can only conjure here, in performance.

Tim Etchells
Sheffield 2002.